How to play Footbauction

Setting up a lobby

One player hosts. Everyone else joins with a code.

The host creates a lobby and chooses three settings, which apply to everyone in the room and can still be changed from the lobby screen before the auction starts:

• Player pool. A global pool of players, or a pool restricted to a single competition.
• Players era. Current players, or All-time, which also includes retired players.
• Game mode. Classic or Blind. The difference is explained below.

Creating a lobby produces a five-character code. Share the code itself, or copy the invite link, which fills the code in for whoever opens it. A lobby holds 2 to 10 managers, and the auction cannot start with fewer than two.

Each manager enters a name and is given a team color, which you can change from the lobby until the auction starts. No two teams in the same lobby can share a color — it is how you tell squads apart later, during the matches. Managers then mark themselves ready, and the host starts the auction.

The auction

Every manager starts with 100 credits. There is no way to earn more.

Players are auctioned one at a time, and the auction moves through the positions in a fixed order: goalkeepers first, then defenders, then midfielders, then forwards. If any squad is still short of a position once the forwards are done, the auction reopens that position and keeps going until every squad is complete. Each player card opens a 10-second clock. Every new bid resets that clock back to 10 seconds, so a contested player can run well past the first countdown.

You raise the current bid in preset steps — +1, +5 or +10 credits. Two limits apply while a card is live:

• You cannot bid when you are already the highest bidder.
• You cannot drop out while you are the highest bidder — dropping out is how you leave a fight, not how you cancel a bid.

When everyone else has dropped out or is no longer eligible, the player is sold to the leading bidder and the credits leave that manager's balance immediately.

Once a player has been offered, he never comes back — sold or unsold, he is gone for the rest of that auction. Players with more than one listed role are hybrids: they may be offered in any category they qualify for, so a wing-back can turn up in the defender phase and a wide forward in the forward phase.

As soon as you have filled your quota for the position being auctioned, you stop bidding on it and simply watch until the auction moves on.

Budget rules

You cannot spend your way into an incomplete squad.

Every manager must finish with exactly 11 players, so the game reserves 1 credit for every slot you still have to fill. Your maximum bid is whatever is left after that reserve.

With an empty squad and 100 credits, winning a player leaves 10 slots open, so 10 credits are held back and your maximum first bid is 90. The reserve shrinks as your squad fills, and on your eleventh and final player you can spend everything you have left.

Two situations hand you a player without an auction:

• You are the last manager who needs that position. With nobody left to bid against, the player is assigned to you for 1 credit — or for nothing, if you have no credits left.
• Every eligible manager has run out of credits. The player is assigned for free to whoever has the fewest players so far.

This is why the endgame matters as much as the opening. Spend everything early and you will be handed whoever is left; hoard too long and you will pay 1 credit a time for cards nobody wanted.

Building your XI

Everyone plays 4-3-3. What you choose is who goes where.

The auction gives every manager the same shape: 1 goalkeeper, 4 defenders, 3 midfielders and 3 forwards, filling these eleven slots.

When the auction ends you get a window to arrange the squad. Tap two players to swap them, or drag them on desktop. The league starts when every manager is ready, or automatically when the timer reaches zero — so an unfinished lineup still goes to the pitch.

Classic and Blind

The same rules. A very different auction.

In Blind mode the ratings are revealed once the tournament is over, on the final screen — which is where you find out whether the player you paid 40 credits for was worth it.

The tournament

Nobody plays the matches. The squads do.

Once every lineup is in, the lobby plays a double round-robin league: every manager meets every other manager twice, home and away. Matches are simulated from the strength of the eleven players you fielded, in the positions you put them in.

• 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw.
• The table is ranked by points, then goal difference, then goals scored.
• The top two managers reach the final.

The final is a single match between those two. If it ends level, it is decided on penalties. The winner takes the tournament, and the full table and the winning squad are shown at the end.